Presenter: Maryam Moghaddami – Cinema Studies
Faculty Mentor(s): Susanna Lim
Session: (In-Person) Poster Presentation
On October 4, 2021, somewhere between Izmailovskaya station and Pervomayskaya station, a fight occurred and resulted in the severe beating and consequent hospitalization of a man by his three adversaries. This story might have been entirely overlooked had it not been for the ethnicity of the men involved which turned into a nationwide sensation. The three men, Dagestanis, severely injured an ethnic Russian male whose only provocation turned out to be his defense of a woman who the three men were harassing.
This paper seeks to examine the depiction of this incident in Russian mass media and discuss its relation to perceptions of identity and nation. In order to do so, this paper will begin by closely reading the depiction of the Circassian male, arguably the 19th century’s de facto “Caucasian male” or “kavkazets” in Alexander Pushkin’s “A Prisoner in the Caucasus.” Pushkin’s work is also notable in its formulation of the Russian identity through its designation of the “kavkazets” as being the “Other.”
This paper will look at the descriptions of this incident and contrast the characteristics assigned by Pushkin and those touched upon by the media covering the incident. Additionally, the paper will emphasize the idea of the “Russian” and the “other” and show how this distinction is emphasized through geography. With the current high in Russian nationalism, the impact of this incident will also be discussed in relation to Russian identity.